


panda express

by hegelsholiday



Series: the geometry of hearts [1]
Category: Dreamcatcher (Korea Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, F/F, Fluff, an extended exercise in self-indulgence, chinese transfer!handong, korean american!dreamcatcher
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-26
Updated: 2019-08-26
Packaged: 2020-09-26 21:56:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20396770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hegelsholiday/pseuds/hegelsholiday
Summary: But mostly, Handong notices the way Yoobin smiles, the way her eyes curve and soften the harder edges of her face, and framed by the afternoon sunlight it looks so goddamn breathtaking.





	panda express

At sixteen, Handong lands in America. Her head is still spinning and aching from the twelve hour difference, and it doesn’t quite hit her that she’s in America until the passenger sitting next to her groans in relief, shifting around for the fallen standard-issue pillow that had fallen beneath his seat. The sun’s setting through the narrow purview of the window next to her, the rest of the plane’s passengers rousing themselves as well.

_We hope you enjoyed your trip and fly with us next time_ the flight attendant recites, but Handong’s only going through the motions now, zipping up her backpack under the seats as the lights in the aisle come back on.

The customs line is long and winding, full of mothers bundling their unruly children into place, and Handong is so very, very tired; the exhaustion in her bones is deep and aching and there, beyond the reach of resolution.

At last, she moves forward, and the lady sent to greet her smiles at her and waves, friendly and cheerful, in a way that Handong with her halting English and tripping fatigue can’t respond properly to.

“Are you Handong?” she says, and she tries, so very clearly, to get the right tones, so Handong doesn’t think too much of the way her name becomes so shockingly foreign when filtered through an American accent.

She shows her to the dorms and promises to take her somewhere else tomorrow. Handong is thankful for that when she flops down on the bed and doesn’t bother to think about anything else really.

\---  
The first day, no teacher really pronounces her name right on the first try. Or the second. But she’s beginning to get used to that part, to hearing the people around her converse in a language she’d only ever heard spoken shakily from the mouth of a teacher who didn’t have any more clue of what she was doing than they did.

The girl sitting in the seat across from her has it worse though, if the way their physics teacher mangles “Gahyeon” is any indication. Thankfully, he’s also old-fashioned enough to address them by their last names, so she becomes Miss Han and the other girls becomes Miss Lee.

She listens carefully, watching him outline diagrams and equations on the whiteboard. He calls on her, asking her what she might think of the concept he just explained. Handong stumbles through not-quite English not quite-Mandarin in her response. He pretends not to notice.

When they do lab, Miss Lee is there to keep her hands steady when Miss Han’s hands nearly crack the egg they’re supposed to be dropping.

\---  
The nice lady she talks to who drops her off at the dorms recommends Panda Express (or rather, it’s the only place she can remember that serves Chinese food.) All Handong wants, selfishly, perhaps, given how much money her parents had paid to fly her to America, is to be sitting at home crowded around a boiling hot pot. All the other girls back home would’ve killed to study in America, to escape the ever present threat of the gaokao looming over everybody’s heads and staining the blackboards white with chalk dust, but Handong doesn’t quite know what’s so great about America.

Panda Express is a fifteen minute walk from her dorms, and even though it’s barely seven yet she has to resist the urge to glance over her shoulder constantly. The fading sunlight plays tricks on her eyes, crafting and twisting shadows out of empty air.

Inside, it’s cracked leather seats and the sticky scent of some thick sauce lingering in the air. Handong looks at the menu with the foreign, not quite pinyin romanizations and orders something that she thinks sounds most like the old rundown noodle place of her hometown.

She pays and takes the foam, smiley-face inscribed take-out box with her. It’s fried noodles, or chow mein as the menu spells it, but when she pokes at it with the plastic fork, the sheer amount of grease, slick in the back of her throat, almost chokes her.

Handong swallows carefully and resolves to buy a rice cooker at the earliest possible opportunity.

\---  
Miss Lee is a sophomore, Handong finds out, and an ambitious one at that.

“I don’t like physics much,” she says while they measure out the heights for their egg drop. The pages of her notebook are waterlogged and crinkled, the result of an accident on the second day, and the creases pop loudly in the still air of the classroom. “But my parents want me to go into a STEM field.”

“And what do you want to do?” Handong asks, curious.

Gahyeon shrugs. “I don’t know. Something that’s not being a doctor. What about you?” she says, after a brief lull in the conversation.

Handong thinks she has violated another one of those unspoken social rules. “I don’t know either,” she confesses. “America is very…” She searches for the right words in English, something large, something there, something overwhelming. “...impressive,” she settles on at last and comes away thinking that wasn’t the right word at all.

But Gahyeon nods and they go back to physics.

\---  
White rice is heavenly, Handong decides.

It’s hot and steaming, perfectly formed. The heat rises against her fingertips like the caress of home and Handong almost wants to cry in relief.

It melts in her mouth along with the leftover egg she’d fried this morning, and it tastes just a bit like Wuhan.

Handong brings white rice to school for lunch. She hasn’t had the opportunity to really buy groceries, but the thought of buying school-cafeteria made cheeseburgers when she could eat rice makes the decision simple.

She starts regretting it after the first few spoonfuls, at lukewarm temperature now in the over-air conditioned hallways of the school and thinks about getting a packet of salt, anything really.

She doesn’t think the pretty girl with her hair cut short and fierce is really approaching her until she sits down not to far away from her. Handong busies herself with her tupperware of rice and tries not to pretend she’s watching the other. Her hair drapes in a dark curtain around her face as she rummages through her bag, before an effortless hair flip tosses it over her shoulder.

Handong swallows a plastic spoonful of rice and tears herself away from staring.

“Hey,” the girl says, looking over with a tupperware of something faintly red in her hands. “Do you want to share? My mom made this curry too spicy and I don’t have anything else to go with it.”

“Yeah,” Handong says, taken aback. “Sure.” The cold tile floor of the school is hardly the ideal place for someone to ask to be sitting, but she shifts her backpack and pats the space right next to her.

The other girl smiles, slightly less intimidating this time, and Handong thinks it should be illegal for her to be so beautiful. “I’m Yoobin by the way.”

\---  
Handong had gotten used to how pleasantly loud the school library is in the afternoons, but when she finds a seat near the windows, the noise washes over her, stubbornly refusing to relegate itself to the background.

She has her notebook opened to a blank page, pen sitting on the page untouched. _Write about yourself. Who are you?_ her English prompt says, but Handong wouldn’t be able to easily answer that question in Mandarin, much less English.

Handong is daughter, student, a stranger in America.

She doesn’t look up immediately when the chair gets pulled out from the side of the table opposite her, thinking it’s someone borrowing it to sit at another table with their friends.

Instead, it’s Yoobin, leaning awkwardly against the back of the chair with an adorably earnest look on her face.

“Hey,” Yoobin sits down, “I was wondering if you wanted to go get boba tea? They opened this new place across the street that I’ve heard is really good.”

“Oh,” Handong says, scrambling to find the right words to say _yes, please, I would love that. I’m lonely, and you’re really nice._

Yoobin laughs, one hand threaded in her chopped locks nervously. “I know we barely know each other, but—”

“It’s fine,” Handong says hurriedly and winces, realizing that it sounds cold and stilted. “I would love to spend more time with you.” That sounds a bit presumptuous and a little more desperate, but Yoobin just smiles at her effortlessly.

“So would I. And I’m also really thirsty for boba tea.”

Handong gathers her things, shuffling around with her notebooks and pencil, acutely aware of Yoobin waiting patiently across from her.

“I don’t know where to go,” she says, as they walk out of the doors of the library. Yoobin grabs her hand as they weave through the gathered crowds of students, tapping away at their phones and waiting for their parents’ cars to pick them up. She suddenly remembers something else. “And I didn’t bring any money.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Yoobin says. “I’ll buy you one and you can pay me back later.”

Handong hesitates, because much as she’d like to take Yoobin up on her offer, she’d been taught like any good girl not to owe other people anything. At the look on her face, Yoobin pats her arm reassuringly as she presses the button on the crosswalk. “Don’t worry,” she says again. “Plus, you have to try the bubble teas of America.”

“Okay,” Handong says, because she’s weak, and she would like boba tea. (The fact that having to pay Yoobin back will mean seeing her in the future is completely unrelated.)

\---  
Handong notices too much about Yoobin. The way she scrunches her cheeks when she sips at her drink, chin resting on her hands, or the way she fiddles around with the straw to find more of the boba at the bottom of the cup.

Handong notices her hand curved casually around the plastic cup, spinning it casually around as she talks. But mostly, Handong notices the way Yoobin smiles, the way her eyes curve and soften the harder edges of her face, and framed by the afternoon sunlight it looks so goddamn breathtaking.

She searches for interesting things to say, things that she can express in English without tripping over herself. Sometimes she does, but mostly it’s Handong’s hand gestures and flailing arms that convey even some sense of meaning.

Handong tells her about a particular kid who went on about how the work was equivalent to the k constant and got offered a drug test by the teacher, and Yoobin’s full on laughing, the stray flyaway curls of her hair bouncing in the still, choked air of the cafe. It’s such a light, careless sound, and it makes Handong ache for something she doesn’t know how to name.

“Oh god,” she says, finally calming down. “That’s priceless. I would’ve loved to see the look on the teacher’s face.”

Yoobin tells her about the period-long argument another kid had engaged the physics teacher in about communism and systems of government. “You get crackheads everywhere in this school.”

Handong isn’t sure what a crackhead is, but she gets the general gist of it. She nods, glancing discreetly at the clock on the wall and wondering when Yoobin will have to leave.

Yoobin laughs sympathetically when Handong tells her about Panda Express.

“Don’t worry,” Yoobin says. “I’ll take you to my favorite k-BBQ place when you have time. There’s still good food around here, just not at Panda Express.”

“I’d like that,” she says, and tries not to think about why Yoobin’s promise to take her more places makes her so happy.

\---  
And Yoobin _does_ take her more places. They spend an entire afternoon in a little corner bookstore, and Handong isn’t sure what Yoobin’s more excited about, the cute stationary or the multitude of books, but either way it’s lovely.

The unadulterated passion that Yoobin shows for the brand new paperbacks or the brightly drawn manga makes her smile, and even she finds herself caught up in buying a few novels.

It’s Handong as an outsider looking in, watching Yoobin thrive among the pages, but it’s not stifling, not excluding, and when they finally leave she feels like she’s stepped right out of fantasy-land back into the real world.

\---  
The first time Yoobin introduces her to Yoohyeon, bright, pretty Yoohyeon, Handong feels that unexpected spark of disappointment that she knows that she shouldn’t. Yoohyeon’s arm is casual around Yoobin’s shoulders, and she leans against the other girl’s shoulder with an ease that Handong envies.

“This is Yoohyeon,” Yoobin says, pulling the girl clinging to her off with an eye roll that clearly can’t convey the level of fondness Yoobin has for her.

“Nice to meet you,” Handong says, with a stiffness that she doesn’t quite know what to do with.

Then Yoohyeon’s glancing at her phone. “Ah, I forgot I had a date with Minji today. Do you think I look okay?”

Yoobin rolls her eyes again, poking at Yoohyeon. “You mean you two finally graduated from awkward flirting to actual dating?”

“I think you look great,” Handong says, the stiffness leaving her as quickly as it comes, and Yoohyeon beams at her. She thinks she might understand what draws Yoobin to someone like Yoohyeon; she’s all-encompassing, impossible to ignore or deny in a way that neither of them really are.

“Have fun you two!” Yoohyeon waves and throws a wink at them.

\---  
Handong finds that there are many useful things to be learned if she only stays quiet and lets others chatter on. She’s always blended in well enough with the crowd, and people ignore you after a while if you don’t say anything.

And the school says things about Yoobin Lee.

“She dresses like a lesbian,” comes up a lot. Handong doesn’t quite know what a lesbian is, and she’d rather not ask.

Most of the people that Yoobin talks to in the hallways do not call her Yoobin. Handong overhears, with aching fascination, that they call her Dami, from a group of Indian guys gathered outside the bus stop.

At first she wonders what would drive someone to use such a drastically different name from the one their parents had lovingly picked out for them, until she remembers the first day and the way all of the non-standard names had gotten mangled by a foreign accent.

(She does ask about this:

“I don’t think I’m saying your name right,” she says, one quiet afternoon. Yoohyeon has gone to organize one of her clubs, and it’s just the two of them. “Would you prefer it if I called you Dami?”

Yoobin smiles. “Don’t worry,” she says. “I like the way you say my name.” Handong thinks it’s just her own imagination that her heart flutters a little.)

\---  
“Yoobin,” Handong asks one day, hesitant, “what’s a lesbian?”

“It’s a girl who likes other girls. Wants to hold them and kiss them and make them happy, you know?” Yoobin, strangely, isn’t looking at her. She has her knees tucked in and her head leaned back against the wall, staring up at the ceiling as if it were Michelangelo’s masterpieces painted on the walls above. Handong knows from personal experience that there’s never been anything interesting there.

“Oh,” she says. “That sounds nice.”

“Yeah,” Yoobin says, cracking a smile that lights up her face and softens her features. “It is.”

Handong watches her with a particular kind of fondness. She wants to reach out and trace around Yoobin’s beautiful eyes and brush the hair away from her face, she wants to be the one who makes Yoobin smile like that everyday; she wants to make Yoobin happy--

_Oh._

“Yoobin,” Handong says, still unsure, but this is right, this is more right than she’s ever felt, “I think I might be a lesbian.”

\---  
(In Wuhan, where all of the students wore perfectly uniform tailored blouses and skirts, they had called Handong cold and icy and wintery and all of the puns on the characters for her name that they were oh-so-clever for thinking of.

Handong’s parents had named her for the east, where the sun rises.

Here, Handong doesn’t think anybody quite cares enough to scrutinize her name or demeanor, and it’s unexpectedly freeing not to be tied to a preexisting reputation she’d built since middle school. There are at least a thousand students in the school at a time, and everyone goes about their lives without a care for where their name would fall relative to their classmates in the ranking.

Here, she can walk around a little too closely to Yoobin, and if anybody says anything, it’s nothing that’s going to travel back to her parents’ ears.)

\---  
The first time Yoobin invites her over, Handong goes about the rest of the other periods with a sort of lightness to her, and even the steady drone of their math teacher explaining integration by parts in complicatedly English terms can’t serve to dampen her mood.

Yoobin’s house is warm and inviting and smells like her, even. It’s that smell of worn-out cloth and thick carpet and food and home and Handong thinks she’s a little too far gone, if she’s even noticing how Yoobin smells. She slips her shoes off despite the loud insistence of Yoobin’s mom, who smiles and laughs with the same recklessness that Yoobin does. Mrs. Lee has the beginnings of wrinkles stretching at the corners of her eyes, and when she speaks it’s some rapid fire of Korean peppered with English that Yoobin responds readily to.

“She thinks you’re very pretty,” Yoobin says in her ear, when Mrs. Lee shows them to the dining room and begins hollering at someone upstairs.

“Oh,” Handong says, a little too flattered and pleased. “Tell her thank you,” she adds on abruptly, when she realizes that she still needs to be polite. She really doesn’t want to make a bad impression on Yoobin’s parents.

Yoobin pulls out a chair for her and helps her parents set the table, and Handong feels like she should be helping, but Mrs. Lee hustles her back into a seat every time she tries. It doesn’t feel right to be just sitting around, but then Yoobin finishes setting the last plate and plops down next to her, and Handong promises herself that she’ll help with the dishes afterwards.

Yoobin’s dad asks, “So how’d Yoobin pick up a friend like you?” and Handong launches into an anecdote that embellishes a few things appropriately, trying to catch Yoobin’s small smile over the rim of her bowl. Mrs. Lee piles more food onto her plate insistently, and Handong can't quite bring herself to refuse.

By the end of it Handong doesn’t want to leave, laughing along with her friend’s family like they were people her parents had known for years, and it feels so painfully like Wuhan, until she turns around and sees the non-military time clock telling her it’s past nine.

“I should really be going,” she excuses herself, but when she opens the front door she’s greeted by the sound of crackling thunder in the distance.

“I’ll drive you home,” Yoobin offers, as they look out at the rain pouring down outside the neighborhood streets.

“Okay,” she says.

In the dark, she hears the rain pattering against the windshield more than she can see it--flooded in the white light of the street lamps, as if it’s only raining in those small patches.

Handong glances over at Yoobin, both hands on the steering wheel, eyes straight ahead, wondering if she should say anything. But this silence feels different than other ones, calming, comforting, like curling up under the covers with a cup of hot tea on nights where the wind was loud against the creaking trees.

“Thanks for this,” Handong says when Yoobin drops her off at the dorms. She doesn’t want to open the car doors yet, for fear of the sound of the thunderstorm drowning out all possibility of conversation. In truth, she isn’t ready for the night to be over yet, isn’t ready for another day spent cramming all of the homework she hadn’t done alone in her dorm.

“Don’t worry about it,” Yoobin says. She fumbles around for a bit in the compartment above her. “I have an umbrella here somewhere, give me a moment.”

She finds it eventually and offers it first to Handong, ever the considerate one, and Handong takes it and opens her side of the door for her. Under the soft sounds of the rain against the tense umbrella fabric, Handong can’t help but worry about whether she’s getting Yoobin wet or not, if right now in the dark, droplets are rolling down into her hair off the sides of the umbrella.

“Yoobin,” Handong says when they reach the door, “thank you again.” Handong doesn’t know how to say it all, to tell Yoobin that _I felt at home again today_ or _I really, really like talking with you_ or _you’re amazing, please know that_ all in a simple “thank you.” She thinks the English language might be a bit cumbersome, but there’s no phrase in Mandarin for this either, all the half-jumbled thoughts that bubble up on her tongue.

“Don’t worry about it,” Yoobin says again. She’s shifting awkwardly from side to side, the umbrella in her hands wet and dripping all over her jeans. In the dim white hallway lights of the entrance lobby, her face looks open and shockingly honest, some strange combination of the Yoobin Handong had seen at home and on that first day of school.

And before Handong can think about how she might make the other uncomfortable, she’s holding out a hand. “Would you like to come up for a bit?”

\---  
It finally happens a bit like this:

One day Handong sees Yoohyeon and Yoobin walking in through the main entrance together, and Handong has a big math test next period that she should be cramming for, but all Handong wants to think about in that moment is Yoobin. She rushes over to them, nearly tripping over herself, and the way Yoobin looks over at her reassures her that this is the right thing to say.

“Yoobin,” Handong says, enunciating her name carefully like it’s her first time saying it again. “I think I might like you. In the more than friends kind of way?”

Yoobin looks at her for a moment; Handong thinks she’s made a mistake, before she says, “I like you too, but I thought I made that really obvious.”

“Oh,” Handong says. “Well. Would you go on a real date with me this time?”

“Yeah,” Yoobin says. “I’d like that.” Handong faintly registers Yoohyeon in the background loudly clapping for them, but then Yoobin’s lips are on hers, soft, inviting, and she forgets to worry about anything else.

(“I thought you two were already dating,” Gahyeon says, when Handong recounts it to her during a physics lab the next day. “But congratulations; I’m glad you two finally got together.”)

\---  
Yoobin doesn’t talk nearly as much as Handong’s used to from people around her. Handong had gotten used to nodding along, listening to other people’s lives and other people’s stories through the animated movements of their mouths, one agonized syllable after another. Sometimes the silence stretches between them all the way down the halls until Handong opens her mouth to say goodbye to Yoobin for next period, but it’s never stifling.

Handong and Yoobin talk as much as they might, without Yoohyeon or Gahyeon sandwiched in between them to keep the conversation going, but in the patches of silence, Yoobin’s hand in Handong’s speaks louder than anything else really could.

Handong likes to think there are stories baked into the lines of Yoobin’s skin, the trace scar from a biking accident, a small bruise on her knuckle when she’d punched an overly presumptuous sophomore, all the little creases and calluses and stray pen marks. Yoobin’s hands are beautifully sculpted, refined in their roughness, the hands of someone who’s lived many lives.

\---  
Handong finds belongingness in America under the striped red and white awning of the Starbucks across the street, Gahyeon giggling beside her and Minji slapping her on the back for something funny she’d unintentionally said. Yoohyeon and Bora are arguing over something stupid while Siyeon watches, rolling her eyes and occasionally letting Bora steal a sip of her drink. Yoobin’s hand in hers is soft, reassuring, a constant sort of comfort that Handong’s found herself addicted to.

Handong takes it for the promise she thinks it is.

**Author's Note:**

> I have no excuse for this bit of self-indulgence other than the fact that I've been wanting someone to write me an asian american high school au ever since I found out kpop fic was a Thing.
> 
> If you got to the end of this mess, thank you for reading.


End file.
